Breathless Read Online Free PDF Page A

straight.
    The Ghost looks me up and down for a minute. “Why don’t you put some clothes on? You’re not a baby anymore. You look like you’re in your underwear.” He averts his gaze. “It’s embarrassing.”
    “Why aren’t you nicer to him?”
    He looks back down, pretends not to have heard.
    “Why, Dad? He didn’t do anything wrong. I told you it was an accident, and you’ve got him stuck up in his room like he’s on house arrest, and he didn’t even do anything.” And I repeat what I’ve heard Will say countless times: “You want him to be just like you, and you can’t accept that he’ll never be that way. You want him to be—”
    “Kathryn, there is a time for foolish loyalty. Now is not the time.” As though there’s any need to remind me again, he adds, “You’re a kid.”
    “I’m fifteen. ” After everything we’ve been through with Will, I sure don’t feel like a kid.
    “I know. That’s how you’re acting.” He goes back to his reading.
    I take a bite of my pear, give it a few good chews, and gather the pulp in my cheek. After Will and the Ghost came in from the roof, my brother spent the rest of the afternoon in his room, headphones on his ears. The only sounds from his room were the tapping of his fingers on his keyboard—probably firing e-mails to his latest group of friends from the latest hospital—and his breath, which I listened to from outside his closed door until I got hungry. I’m amazed my parents let him have a computer in his room at all.
    “Believe me,” I say to the Ghost, “the second I turn eighteen, I’m packing everything I own and getting out of here. There’s no way you’ll keep me imprisoned until I’m twenty years old.”
    The Ghost seems to suppress a smirk. “Imprisoned? Kathryn, you can’t even begin to—” And he stops. “Never mind.”
    “What? I can’t even begin to what? To understand?”
    He murmurs to my mother, “This is a sick family.” His head is down now, palm over my mother’s hand. “Sick,” he repeats.
    I stand there for another few moments, waiting for him to say something else to me. When he doesn’t, I gather my hair in a pile on top of my head and rise toward him on one strong leg, pointing my toe outward, and spit my mouthful of pear onto the pages spread on his lap.
    He looks up, stunned, confused by what has just occurred. I am immediately sorry but not really—not sorry enough to stop. His eyes are mine. I am his. I am satisfied, knowing he will feel my anger in his blood.
    “I hate you,” I say, keeping his gaze. “You hear me?” I look at my mother, who stares at me, trembling. “You too. I hate both of you.”
    The Ghost uses his handkerchief to wipe away the pear and turns the page in the thesis he’s reading.
    My mother looks around, notices the pulp in the handkerchief, startled. She does that a lot when she’s drunk—just kind of spaces out for a while. “I just put away laundry in Will’s room. He wasn’t there. His door was open, and I was in his room for a few minutes, putting things in drawers. . . .” A flutter of panic, frantic as a pair of damaged wings, takes hold of her voice. “Katie? Where’s Willie?”
    The doorbell rings.
    Beth George, our neighbor a few houses down, stands alone on our front porch. She’s in her midforties and has something like six kids already and is visibly pregnant again. Every member of the George family has bright red hair. Beth’s husband has been in and out of jail for DUI so many times that even our teachers at school make open jokes about it, and none of the George kids seem to care.
    Beth looks at each of us. When she speaks, her tone is nervous but not panicked. “I think you ought to know,” she says, “your son’s been knockin’ on people’s doors, tellin’ them to come watch him. He’s on the swing set in my backyard. He’s got a knife, and he says he’s gonna kill himself.”
    My parents and I start to run. When we get to Beth’s